In the old days of the web — and still today with desktop software — an application was self-contained. Users would start and one end and go through to the other entirely within that single, custom-built application; what we’ll refer to as a vertical experience (even though shown here visually as horizontal – only because it fits better on the page):
Around 2002 we saw the uptake of shopping cart frameworks on e-commerce sites. Most of them were somewhat customisable and configurable but you got to know the feel and function of the different technologies. Ah, this is an osCommerce cart, or Magento etc.
Then PayPal came along and started being added as a third-party payment solution. I avoid “integrated” because PayPal isn’t really integrated. It’s logically and visually tacked on the end of a payment pathway. Users experience a hard cutover from the website they were shopping on to the payment page.
I refer to these experiences as “horizontal” because they cut across multiple sites:
Now, a narrow view on this might be that this interruption in experience, in consistency and smoothness of transition for users within a single product might be undesirable, and for first-time users of that common, shared platform such as PayPal is almost certainly is.
However a broader view would show that by using a common platform it reduces the number of experiences and mental models a user needs to retain across their entire web browsing experience. Use PayPal on eBay once and you can use PayPal again on another site, and another, each time increasing your competence and familiarity with that shared system and experience.
With Facebook branching out into world domination we’re now seeing Facebook “Like” widgets pop up all over the place. Doesn’t matter where you see the little button, you know what it means and what it does. You don’t have to relearn it every time as you would if it was a proprietary ‘favouriting’ control unique to each website. It’s joined other common share widgets like Digg, Twitter, Delicious and StumbleUpon, the icons of which we see underlining every blog post and article on the web. It can’t keep going on like this.
Is this trend of common platforms and this ‘de-siloing’ of the web going to continue and overtake the ever-accelerating splurge of new technologies and frameworks spilling out onto the Internet daily? Are we heading towards a future where instead of 120 different blogging platforms we simply have blogging capabilities, photo hosting capabilities etc all decentralised down to the user level – which is something the Diaspora project is aiming to achieve?
// purecaffeine.com: user experience design, social experience design, social media, Gov 2.0, design thinking and service design blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
